Monday, 1 July 2013

The Curiosity Chair

Collections and those that Collect them fascinate me, and reoccur often as the basis for my work. Their obsessive nature makes for a pretty interesting character trait that resonates with so many of us.

With my latest work, The curiosity chair, I wanted to create a piece that would conjure up a character in peoples minds, and encourage them to create their own story about the history of this unusual chair.

This piece was a massive undertaking for me as I have not done a great deal of carpentry before, and this involved many different techniques, as well as upholstering with leather for the first time. Time was the other massive factor in the making of this piece as I wanted somewhere to show the chair where people could interact with it and contribute to the piece by way of their own story, as part of Hothouse we were offered to exhibit as the Contemporary Craft Festival in Devon, and I decided this would be an interesting place to engage with the public. I asked visitors to write down their own stories about the chairs origin and stick them up on my story wall.

My story wall filled up as the weekend went on.

It was fantastic to see all the different reactions I got from people at the festival from all ages, from looks of pure wonder, to confusion, even to anger!

I am currently working on a way to use all the great stories I collected, so if you have your own story you would like to add to my collection, about the history of the chair, who owned it? what did they keep in it? where was it kept? please contact me here